


Come and be welcomed

by often_adamanta



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Domestic, Gen, Past Abuse, Scars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-10
Updated: 2013-06-10
Packaged: 2017-12-14 12:18:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/836789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/often_adamanta/pseuds/often_adamanta
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bruce wasn't lying when he said that they were a time bomb, which is why it makes no sense when all their edges fit together into something whole.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Come and be welcomed

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lalalalalee](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lalalalalee/gifts).



> Written for lalalalalee as part of the the [AO3 Auction](http://ao3auction.tumblr.com/). Thank you for bidding on me! I really hope you like it, especially since I took a very angsty prompt and made it fluff. 
> 
> Unbetad. Brief, non-explicit mention of past abuse.

"I said, "By the fires, I see this is hell.  
By the looks on your faces, you're damned here as well."  
They said, "Come and be welcomed, wearing your curse.  
To get here, you must have walked through hell first."

Well, I knew I'd been somewhere, because I was burned.  
I was proud of my scars, like trophies I'd earned.  
And I knew I was lost before I could begin  
Where lust is a crime, desperation a sin"

from _More Thumbscrews_ by Cats Laughing

\----------------------------

Bruce comes out of the lab one day to find Clint sitting in the common area off the main kitchen in the tower and shoving chips in his face. “Hey,” Clint said.

“Hello,” Bruce said, stopping next to the couch.

“Have you seen this system?” Clint asks, gesturing with the remote. “I didn’t even know there were this many channels. I’m watching _Supernanny_ in Portuguese right now.”

“You speak Portuguese?” Bruce asks, surprised.

“Not well,” Clint answers and then puts an improbable amount of chips in his mouth.

“Me either,” Bruce says, although he had picked up some during his stay in Brazil. Bruce settles on the couch, taking a chip when Clint offers him the bag. They sit in silence for a while, intent on the show until Bruce asks, “Are you here to check up on me?” during a commercial.

Clint snorts. “Nope. Just wanted to get away from SHIELD for a while.” Clint crunches through another handful of chips and shrugs. “It was a little … tense. Thought I’d come and make Tony regret his offer.”

Bruce nods. “I’ve noticed that wholesale destruction tends to make people nervous. Can’t imagine why.”

Clint grins and tilts the chip bag his way again.

\-----

Bruce has made it very clear that he is not going to SHIELD unless the world is in danger, so he misses the scene that leads to Steve moving to the tower.

He hears about it, though, because when Tony gets back with Steve in tow, he is absolutely gleeful.

“What happened?” Bruce asks calmly, trying to soften the manic edge Tony always gets when Steve is around.

“It was beautiful,” Tony says, hands waving in the air. “It was so beautiful that I was quiet for the entire ten minutes that Cap here was talking. It was a virtuoso performance in rant. I am going to go hack SHIELD and download the whole thing, give me five minutes.” Tony leaves the room and heads for his lab, discussing the particulars with JARVIS. It’s a toss up whether he’ll be back or get distracted and forget.

Steve looks a little embarrassed, but judging by the tightening of his jaw, not remorseful. “I found out that Fury is still planning to use the weapons they have from Hydra. I thought he’d learned something from the messing with the Tesseract and,” Steve waves a hand toward the window to encompass the mess New York is slowly digging its way out of, “everything.”

“Not so much, huh?” Bruce asks.

“No,” Steve says, then sighs. “I let myself get caught up, and then next thing I know I’m making a dramatic exit and agreeing to stay with Tony for a few days. I’m not even sure how that happened.”

Bruce shrugs. He’s not sure how Tony convinced him to stay, either.

Steve runs a hand through his hair, clearly frustrated. “I shouldn’t have lost my temper, though. That never really helps.”

“Tell me about it,” Bruce says drily, and Steve’s eyes widen as he realizes what he’s said. “I mean, having a temper,” Bruce continues with a grin, “What’s that even like?”

Steve laughs, genuine and a little sheepish.

“I’ll show you around if you’d like,” Bruce offers after a second. “It’s really not so bad, if you ignore all the structural damage.”

“Thanks,” Steve says, getting up and following Bruce without hesitation. 

\-----

Natasha is in and out of the tower on her own schedule for so long that Bruce isn’t really sure when she moves in. The first he finds out about it is the morning he turns up for breakfast and finds her painting her nails at the kitchen island while Clint cooks eggs.

“Oh,” Bruce says intelligently, and tries to think up a reason to be elsewhere immediately. He’s been avoiding Natasha since the Other Guy tried to brutally murder her. He figures it’s the polite thing to do.

“You might as well come join us, Dr. Banner,” Natasha says, not looking up. “It’s going to be hard to avoid me forever when we’re living together.”

“That’s true,” Bruce says, getting a cup of coffee and leaning against the counter to drink it slowly. After a few minutes of silence, he gestures to Natasha’s hands with his mug. “New color?” he asks.

“No,” she says, “Just a patch job. There isn’t a nail polish on the market that can stand up to close combat.” She blows on the freshly painted nails of her right hand.

“Eggs?” Clint offers.

“Ah, thank you,” Bruce says. He should probably refuse, but it smells wonderful, and it’s not a good idea for him to get very hungry.

Clint portions out the eggs onto three plates, and they join Natasha at the bar.

“Did Natasha ever tell you how we met?” Clint asks after a few minutes of silent eating. The eggs taste as good as they smell.

“No,” Bruce admits.

Natasha grins. “SHIELD sent him to kill me,” she says, as if it’s an amusing anecdote. Maybe it is, to her. “He wasn’t very good at it.”

“Hey,” Clint protests, “Who ended up concussed and shot with two arrows?”

“Flesh wounds,” Natasha answers immediately, “Who was drugged and ended up with two broken bones?”

Clint shrugs. “Turns out I didn’t need that leg to bring you in, anyway.”

“Especially since that’s what I wanted,” Natasha laughs.

Bruce grins at their antics. He suspects that he was meant to join them for breakfast and hear this story. “I suppose situations like that are common in SHIELD,” he says.

“Nothing about Natasha is common,” Clint teases.

Natasha makes a show of considering the question a little more carefully. “Not common,” she says, “But certainly not unthinkable, or unforgivable.”

Bruce takes another bite of his eggs and gives it some thought. “I can see that,” he says instead of ‘message received’. “I guess as a group Avengers are just more likely to try and kill each other.”

“I certainly want to kill Tony every time he causes an explosion at three in the morning,” Clint jokes, and Bruce finds himself laughing with them.

After that, he stops trying to avoid Natasha.

\-----

It’s really only a mild inconvenience in the scheme of things, but Bruce still hates how pretty much everyone has seen him naked by now.

“Bruce,” Thor says cheerfully, saluting him with a glass of milk. Half a box of oreos sits in front of him. Bruce suspects the other half is soon to disappear as well. “I am glad to see you awake and well.”

“Yes,” Bruce says, a little confused. He’d woken up in his room in a pair of tattered pants with no memory of how that had happened.

“Thor brought you back so that you didn’t have to go to SHIELD,” Clint says, coming in and stealing an oreo. Thor frowns at him before deciding to allow it.

“Steve is giving a report,” Natasha says, giving him a bottle of water. “There was no reason for all of us to be there.”

“Thanks,” Bruce says to Thor, sitting down and taking a drink of his water. His head aches a little, as always, but it will fade in a few hours.

“You are very welcome,” Thor says with a large smile, carefully dunking an oreo in milk before putting into his mouth whole. “May I ask a question?” he says after he swallows.

“Sure,” Bruce agrees.

Thor smiles again. “Will you tell me of the adventure behind the scars on your arm?”

Bruce freezes and very carefully doesn’t bring his hand up to touch his left arm. There’s no point anyway. The round scars are on the inside of his upper arm and very much hidden from view by the shirt he’s currently wearing. They are faint but unmistakably cigarette burns.

Well, unmistakable to anyone familiar with cigarettes.

Thor seems to understand that he’s said something wrong and, slightly subdued, tries to explain himself. “I had a scar on my shoulder when I was young. It was from a beast not known to this world. It’s bite corroded our weapons and burnt our flesh, but I defeated it in the end. It took several centuries to heal, and still I am called upon to tell the tale when we feast in Asgard.”

Bruce takes another drink of water, his mouth gone dry. He doesn’t think the story of his father spending a summer testing his ability to heal will be quite as in demand.

Luckily, Natasha saves him from answering. “It doesn’t take adventures for humans to end up with scars,” she explains to Thor. She takes his hand and places it on the back of her skull, his fingers sifting through her hair to the scalp. “Feel that?” she asks.

Thor nods, fascinated.

“I fell as a child,” she told him, “And hit my head on the railing of the steps I was walking down. Normal, everyday things can hurt, too.”

“You cannot heal even such a simple injury?” Thor asks, surprised.

“It did heal,” Natasha says with a shrug, “But it also left a scar.”

“Yeah,” Clint chimes in, and pulls up his shirt to show a few faint, white lines crossing his back. “I was in the circus, and almost everyone had a few of these from getting in the way of the whips they used on the animals.” Clint smirks at Natasha. “Even that’s a more impressive story than being clumsy.”

“I was very young,” Natasha says loftily, “And there is a lot of ice in Russia.”

“Are we comparing scars?” Tony asks, coming into the room at the tail end of the conversation as Clint pulls down his shirt, “Because prepare for shock and awe.” Tony begins a highly exaggerated story of how he became Iron Man, and Thor is completely distracted and captivated by a close up view of the arc reactor.

“Thanks,” Bruce says softly to Natasha and Clint, because he’s not sure what he would have said if they hadn’t interfered.

Clint gives him an exaggerated wink, and Natasha smiles. “Steve will explain why that was an unfortunate question later,” she says, equally quiet. “Thor is great, but he doesn’t always understand us yet.”

 _Us_ , Bruce thinks, amazed, and smiles back.


End file.
